Songfacts®:

• Dancing With the Beast's lead single finds Gretchen Peters singing of an old woman who still manages to approach each day with a tenacious resolve, despite suffering a great deal in life.
  
  "In retrospect, I think there's a lot of my mother in there," Peters reflected to The Boot. "My mom died in late 2016, when she was 93 years old. She was a no-bulls--t person. By the time she was into her 90s, she had kind of seen it all. And [the character in that song] is one of my favorite characters."
• Peters said that the woman in "Disappearing Act" could be the same person she sang of on one of her 2012 Hello Cruel World tracks. "I mean, she could easily be an older version of the woman in 'Five Minutes,' she explained. "I think all writers go back and pick at the same old wounds, whatever those are. I think we all have places and characters and situations that we go back to and visit."